SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
I recently found myself awkwardly crouched down, trying not to bang my head and trying to figure out how to wedge myself into a tight, low space.
REID WISEMAN: Actually kneel down...
DETROW: OK.
WISEMAN: ...Kind of facing the ground.
DETROW: All right.
WISEMAN: We got to teach you how to do this like an astronaut. OK. And now you just kind of start rolling your way. Don't scratch your watch. Yep. And now your feet come up and over. Yes. Perfect.
DETROW: That is astronaut Reid Wiseman. And it should be said, he was much more smooth about making his way into the same small nook at the front of the training mockup of an Orion space capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. We were now both on our backs, laying on blue seats that, when we craned our necks up, allowed us to look out four port windows, and when we look straight forward, put us flush against a complicated panel of screens, knobs and switches, some of which they hope they never need to touch.
WISEMAN: In general, the switches are not intended to be used if everything is going well.
DETROW: OK.
WISEMAN: These switches are last-ditch efforts. Like, for here, this is main parachute deploy. So if we are in a really bad day and our main parachute does not deploy, moving this switch will send an electrical signal from the battery directly to the employment motor...
DETROW: This time next year, if everything stays on schedule, which, with an effort like this is a really big if, Wiseman plans to be in this seat commanding Artemis II, the first flight around the moon in more than 50 years. The screens display dense lines of flight data. To me, they're all random numbers. To Wiseman, they're telling a high-stakes story.
WISEMAN: This doesn't look like much, but this will be the acceleration time profile for going into space. The things that we really look at are VI in the upper left. That's our velocity. When we leave planet Earth, we're zero miles an hour. And when we hit low Earth orbit, we're doing 17,000 miles an hour. And then when we come back in the atmosphere, we're doing 39 times speed of sound, 25,000 miles an hour. It's crazy numbers.
DETROW: Wiseman and three other astronauts will spend 10 days flying to the moon and back. They'll lift off as soon as a year from now, though the launch date hasn't been set yet. Artemis II will be the first crewed mission to the moon since the end of the Apollo program. Its goal will be to test out the Orion capsule and all the other equipment so that by 2026, Artemis III can put astronauts back on the moon.
The Artemis program is aimed to kick start a new, more enduring era of space travel that leads to Mars. It's also intentionally more representative than Apollo was. The Artemis program will eventually put the first woman on the moon, as well as the first person of color. It's all as historic and high stakes as it gets and also pretty daunting.
There's that whole 25,000-mile-an-hour reentry to think about, and also the fact the crew will have to spend 10 whole days in this small capsule, about 12 feet wide inside, but in many places, just 5 feet or so tall. The capsule is chrome silver on the outside. Inside, it's mostly white with orange plastic pipes and beige fabric straps running along its walls. Here and there, metal boxes are bolted to the sides. And again, it all feels pretty cramped.
CHRISTINA KOCH: It's a lot bigger in 3D when you can float around. That's what I'm telling myself.
DETROW: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
DETROW: Mission specialist Christina Koch, like Wiseman, has been to space before. She spent nearly a year on the International Space Station.
KOCH: The other day, we figured out where we might all hang our sleeping bags. One person will be bat like and hang in kind of from - to describe it, in the top part of what you can imagine the capsule shape is, there's a little bit of a little pop up, a tunnel. And so that will be where they hang either feet up or head up. And then the other folks are - kind of be more like what you might consider horizontal with what is the bigger base of the capsule or the floor, kind of.
DETROW: That seems like the cozy spot.
DETROW: That's what I'm saying.
WISEMAN: I like how Christina didn't identify that she has already declared that spot hers, but we know that is her spot. She can give it up if she wants, but that is her spot.
DETROW: Along with Koch and Wiseman, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen and pilot Victor Glover round out the crew. Koch, Hansen and Glover will be the first woman, Canadian and Black astronauts, respectively, to head to the moon. And they've now been preparing since April 2023, spending time in this mock-up capsule, familiarizing themselves with the layout. They train in different places all over the world too. The most critical sessions, though, also happen in Houston, in the simulator. Wiseman says they practice what to do when things go according to plan and when things do not go according to plan.
WISEMAN: We like to challenge our brains and see how we can work through a system. Every time you push a button, you take that split second before you push that button to think, what is this button about to do to this vehicle? And where am I going to be after I push that button? And that is a huge challenge to think through all of that.
DETROW: All the reps are useful for the astronauts, but also for the people who will be working in Mission Control.
WISEMAN: Every time we do one of these simulations, we are tied together. And it's, how are they solving problems, and how are we solving problems? How are we talking together? They have a lot more insight into the vehicle than we do. They have other things that they can do. They have different ways of troubleshooting.
DETROW: Working together to solve problems, testing different scenarios out in the simulator.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "APOLLO 13")
ED HARRIS: (As Gene Kranz) Tell me this isn't a government operation.
DETROW: It's a dynamic the rest of us know from high drama space movies like "Apollo 13."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "APOLLO 13")
CHRISTIAN CLEMENSON: (As Dr. Chuck) Those CO2 levels are going to be getting toxic.
HARRIS: (As Gene Kranz) Well, I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole - rapidly.
DETROW: In real life, the troubleshooting is critical, if a little less dramatic, because things can and do go wrong in space exploration. Artemis II is effectively a test flight. And while NASA has had a string of high-profile successes lately, there's also been a vivid example in the news this summer of a test flight that has not gone according to plan.
Two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will end up spending eight months on the International Space Station instead of their initially planned eight days because of problems with the Boeing Starliner capsule they were testing. They're now scheduled to return in February on a different spacecraft. If anything goes wrong for the Artemis crew between the Earth and the moon, resources, the forces of gravity and just their sheer distance from everybody else makes the contingency plan very different.
MORIBA JAH: There isn't this kind of backup system because they're going to be very far away.
DETROW: That's Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UT Austin.
JAH: You know, we don't have more of these Orions just sitting on shelves to go launch, you know, the backup and rendezvous with them and all this other stuff. Like, they're going to have to figure it out or not.
DETROW: Which is why all the training and preparation on the ground is so essential.
JEREMY HANSEN: We have super-smart people who try to dream up all the things that could go wrong, and then we try to have a backup plan or a redundant system. But at the end of the day, we also know there are the unknown unknowns, and there's risk involved.
DETROW: The Artemis flight will be Jeremy Hansen's first trip to space.
HANSEN: And part of the preparation of going to do something like this is understanding that there's a, you know, very real chance you don't come back. We're trying to understand the risks that we're taking and make an intentional decision to accept that risk or not accept that risk. And I feel really good about this program and the leadership and their courage to make hard decisions.
DETROW: Assuming everything goes according to plan, though, the crew has quite the to-do list and quite the view. Here's Koch.
KOCH: Our primary task is observing - observing the moon in the short period of time that we have our flyby. We're expecting maybe 45 minutes where we can really observe the moon. And our job is to tell the scientists back home the things that lunar probes can't see or tell. And that is, what colors do human eyes see? What observations, large scale, do we see? And it's a supreme responsibility to have eyes on the far side of the moon. We hope that we'll be able to see it depending on its face.
DETROW: I do wonder, like, when you think about your mindset, when you think about what you have to do, how much just the enormity of going to the moon - I know two of you have been on the space station before. How different is it? Or do you just put that inside and say, this is a mission, I'm training for it, and that's what I need to do? Like, do you let the Neil Armstrong of it all kind of get into your head day-to-day?
KOCH: I like to allow space for that every once in a while. And, for me, allowing about two seconds every couple months is enough. The enormity when it hits me is there, and it's important. But for the most part, I'm focusing on the mission.
WISEMAN: Scott, as you were asking that question, that's very similar, but I have to expand two seconds because last night, I was in bed getting ready to go to sleep. And it's - that started, like, thinking about riding this gigantic rocket, going all the way out to the moon with Christina, Victor, Jeremy. And I had to get up and go for a walk around my living room for a second because I just couldn't get myself back into the mode of going to sleep. And I knew I needed to rest. But sometimes it does - sometimes it hits you. And then most of the time, it's just a - kind of in the background.
DETROW: Still, even with all of that, astronaut life does have its slow moments.
WISEMAN: There's that great social media thing - what my parents think I do, what my friends think I do, what I actually do. And a lot of our time is spent in meetings, talking to people, thinking through the ways to tackle challenges. And I think that gets lost on folks.
DETROW: The world has changed a lot since astronauts last flew to the moon 52 years ago. The sum total of the computing technology that powered the Apollo missions is inside most people's pockets, is on their wrists. NASA is peering into faraway black holes with high-powered telescopes. It's crashing probes into meteors. Private spaceflight is a more commonplace reality. Just this week, for the first time, a private mission conducted a spacewalk. So after more than a half a century, going back to the moon feels long overdue.
KOCH: When I look at humanity and the call to explore that humans have put out there, we were always going to go back to the moon and go back to stay. There was never a time in our history as a species when that wasn't going to happen, where we weren't going to push further. And so our role is just really answering that call. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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